


Yours To Lose

by museicalitea



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - One Piece Fusion, Gen, Mentions of other Fukurodani characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-29 21:06:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8505358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/museicalitea/pseuds/museicalitea
Summary: After close to four days of searching, everything had pointed to their missing crewmates being on this clifftop.But they aren't there, and Bokuto doesn't know what to do.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I say this is a One Piece fusion, but... well, this _is_ set in the world of One Piece, or at least that's where it is in my head, but does anyone have Devil's Fruit powers? Is anyone non-human? Who are the creepy weird enemies? ...Idk either. I am only a very casual One Piece fan, and I don't know a heap about the canon or the universe. Just trust me when I say this is where they ended up in my head, and that's how it is.
> 
> This is something I wrote in my fourth attempt I got at a prompt around this time last year: "The way you said I love you—too quietly, muttered into your scarf". It's a loose interpretation more than anything else, but sometimes those are the best ones to play with.

"They’re not here," Akaashi says.

The words ring heavy in the air: heavier than the storm building on the horizon, more ominous than the crash of waves against the cliffs beneath them. Bokuto doesn’t want to believe them. They can’t be true. After days of searching, hours they haven’t spent sleeping so they can cover more ground in less time, the tracks so clearly laid out for them…

After all this, they should be here. They were meant to be here.

But there’s no one on the cliff top except him and Akaashi, travel weary with dragging feet and dull eyes, and he can’t find anything.

"They have to be here," Bokuto says. His voice wobbles. He didn’t mean it to, and he forces himself to swallow and take a deep breath before he speaks again. This isn’t a place he can fall apart. Not here, not now. "They… we just gotta look further along, that’s all!"

"Bokuto-san," Akaashi murmurs, voice muted by the scarf wrapped thick and close round his neck, pulled up past his chin against the bitter wind, "we’ve been searching this area for two hours. There’s no one here but us, now."

"They were here, though."

Akaashi’s forehead creases, just a bit, and he nods. There’s no doubt that their missing friends came to this place, and recently.

The blood-soaked handkerchief they found in the grass—the one embroidered with Komi’s family’s crest—is testament to that.

He speaks without willing his mouth to move. "What happened to them?"

The words linger in the air longer than Bokuto likes. These thoughts are heavy. So strangely, horribly heavy. He doesn’t lose nakama often, and he doesn’t know how to carry these words without his missing crewmates’ strength.

He doesn't expect Akaashi to try and answer him, and Akaashi doesn't.

Could they search the rest of this island for them? Maybe. His remaining crewmates would, if Bokuto came back and told them to. Nakama is… well, nakama . They're more than friends, far more than family. They're bonded through experience and danger and loyalty, through fierce ties stronger than iron and tighter than heartstrings that not one of them could ever break. _Nakama_ is what he dubbed each of them in turn, and it means more than anything else in this world.

Everyone remaining would search. Staunch Yukie with kicks and fists like hellfire; Sarukui with half the infirmary strapped to his back and legs and a will of dragonfire behind that placid half-smile; Onaga, so tall and uncertain but for his longstaff and his pride in being part of the crew. Konoha, who would take any weapon you gave him, break through any bond you put in him, and tear the world apart and burn it to the ground to find those missing three. He stayed at the ship out of duty, but Bokuto knows that enemy crew would be long dead had he hunted them down.

His crew, he has not doubt, would search to eternity. Only, Bokuto is scared of what they would find if they did.

They're targets, after all. Most times, their bounties are a talking point. How much had each grown between islands? Whose was stacking up faster? Who had the best photo on the new edition of posters?

It’s all fun and games, all part and parcel of being a group of relatively harmless pirates (they'd finish conflicts but never start them without just cause). Bokuto forgets, often, that each of them has a price on their head, and there are people aplenty in the world who'd take their heads just to get it.

And Washio’s got the highest bounty of all, and history with the authorities and Marines and so many others that the rest of them can only dream of. There are plenty who'd love to see him dead.

One of Kaori’s throwing blades—a half-moon one—was stuck in a tree barely metres from the path Bokuto and Akaashi followed up the island. How fast were they running that she had no time to retrieve it? How tired—or desperate—were they, that her aim was poor enough for it not to fly back into her hand glazed with blood from the jugular?

The blade wasn’t even bloody. A deterrent, for the pursuers? Or a sign, for those she thought might follow?

Their need had to be great, Akaashi said then with dark eyes and nostrils flaring in burgeoning fear, if Kaori was willing to lose a weapon.

But great as their need may be, Bokuto fears he has failed them. Because by rights, by signs, by everything they’ve seen and smelt and trusted their guts on in this mad, terrified chase, he and Akaashi should have met them on this cliff face.

But they’re nowhere to be seen.

He opens his mouth to speak, but can’t stop his voice cracking. He doesn’t try to quell it.

"I can’t… I can’t even find them. I can’t make sure they’re safe, I can’t defend them, I—Akaashi, what if they’re dead?"

Akaashi sucks in a breath, then lets it out hard and steels his jaw. "They can take care of themselves. They must know we’ll be out looking for them. They won’t expect anything less of you, Bokuto-san."

"Won’t they?"

He’s the captain. He leads them into battles, into bar fights, into grand adventures; towards treasure, towards glory, towards the people his eyes alight upon, and he knows will be new nakama . Yet, he knows sometimes he thinks too big and fights too foolhardy, and his body can’t keep up, and the frustration builds in an endless cycle until he can’t deal with it.

And the rest of the crew step in, they always step in, and it has to be troublesome for them. No. It is troublesome for them, they’ve said so.

(And sure, they’ve also said he’s their nakama as well, so why wouldn’t they—but how can he help but doubt?)

And doubt is a strong thing, and it builds and festers hot and dark in his tummy. The wind is cold in his face, and the first tiny, icy splashes of rain spit down. The storm’s going to hit properly soon. They don’t have any time.

He should send Akaashi back to where it’s sheltered. It wouldn’t do for their navigator to come down ill, not when he has to lead them back through this strange land where their crewmates have gone missing. Bokuto knows he himself has a constitution like a lead casket, and he has to keep searching. But it would be silly to drag anyone else into this with him. Not now there’s a storm about to break.

He ought to be able to warn Akaashi and the others if they will be bringing only bodies or less back to the ship.

He just—he just has to figure out which way to go, which tracks to follow through the salty grass, how fast he ought to travel, how, how—

"Bokuto-san."

He hadn’t heard Akaashi move, and yet there he stands, not two feet away from Bokuto, and looking much as though he’s about to deliver a telling-off.

"You weren’t about to do something foolish on your own, were you?"

Bokuto winces. Dammit, how is the guy so perceptive?

Akaashi rolls his eyes very hard, but then his face settles, and goes—no, not serious. Determined, in a pretty and aloof fashion, because Akaashi wouldn’t be Akaashi otherwise.

"You know," he says, "that I won't go back by myself? I'm staying with you."

"Eh? No! I... uh..." Bokuto works his jaw as he tries to find the words, and attempts a smile. Even he can barely manage it. "Not back to the ship. Just. You should get out of the rain! Don't want our precious navigator getting a cold!"

Akaashi tilts his head and frowns. "I don't care about that, Bokuto-san. I'm going to stay out here and help you find our crewmates. There's no other option. You'll have to tie me up if you want it otherwise."

"I'm not gonna tie you up!"

"Good. Because that would take a while, and it's going to start raining hard soon."

Akaashi starts to move off, and Bokuto doesn't understand. Akaashi is not selfish, not exactly, but he does care about his own comfort. More than Bokuto does, at any rate. He avoids being out in the rain when they're docked if at all possible.

"Why," he says, because he can't think of anything else. "You don't have to. I'm... I'm the captain. It's my responsibility."

"I know. But they're not just yours." Back tense, Akaashi stops. And then he turns, and walks back, and sets his jaw and sets his dark eyes high to stare into Bokuto's. "They're not just yours to lose, Bokuto-san."

Akaashi doesn't have a heart of stone. He wears his heart more covered up than many of them (though, Washio is like that too, and Konoha was for a long time), but it's still just flesh, and ruled by things that Bokuto doesn't understand but Sarukui does, things like hormones and reflexes and an insatiable need to keep beating. Medically, it's complex.

Bokuto doesn't think of the heart like that. All he needs to know is that when you love a person, you feel something, in some way, for them. You will do anything, sometimes at any cost, and it doesn't matter so much.

Someone asked Akaashi, once, who he was loyal to. They saw his cool face and heard fragments of his sharp, swift tongue, and thought he would contract out, thought he would come and go thoughtlessly as the wind. Akaashi listened to them, and did not hesitate in his reply.

"I am loyal to my crew, and my captain. Where he goes, I go, and I don’t intend to leave his side."

Bokuto always thought that Akaashi was dutiful, at the very least. That he had a debt to Bokuto and his crew, and would feel free to leave them once he had paid it off.

What he never expected was to find out that Akaashi was not just dutiful. He had faith, and loyalty, and kept both locked away somewhere dark and hard to find. But somehow, for some reason, he chose to stay by Bokuto for months after he didn’t need to anymore. And Washio and Komi sat him down one day, and explained it.

"He’s not still here ‘cause he’s got a debt to us, dude," Komi said, and Washio had nodded, eyes fixated on Bokuto.

"Why are any of us here?"

Bokuto had shrugged, and wound a fidgety hand round the ropes in the rigging. Washio hadn’t broken eye contact with him once.

"Akaashi’s loyal to you. I don’t know if he’ll tell you himself but he is. We can all see it."

And he thought he understood. He saw Akaashi relax on the ship day by day. Saw him discuss their routes and the ocean current patterns with Konoha. Helped him and Komi escape Yukie's wrath after they invaded the pantry. Watched him as he watched that tall, reclusive boy training on shore, and moved to make him theirs at Akaashi's edging.

Then Akaashi took a knife to the gut just so Bokuto could escape with what they’d come to win, and he understood. It was only the two of them there, and Akaashi had chosen Bokuto.

But Bokuto has never had his priorities straight in the heat of the moment—afterwards, though, is when he realises that maybe he does—and he could do nothing but choose Akaashi back.

They lost the treasure, but that didn’t matter, not a bit, once Bokuto had run for eight hours and found the crew, his crew, and Akaashi survived. The look Akaashi gave him, when Bokuto came to see him the infirmary…

He’ll never forget it. It was the look of someone lost, who did not expect to be found.

Akaashi never told Bokuto to leave without him after that.

Still, he has to ask.

"Why me? Why are you doing this for me?"

Akaashi grows very still. Above them, the wind howls lone and wild, and they stand there ina faceoff, Akaashi and Bokuto. Navigator and Captain. Bokuto cares for all his crewmates but there is something that strikes him in the strangest place about Akaashi and he doesn't know why, or where it came from.

Akaashi steps forwards and clasps both of Bokuto’s hands in his. His grip is steady. Akaashi has sure hands, as certain with a quill as they are with a sword or bowing his violin, and they do not falter now.

Though his hands are strong and still, his face looks as though one wrong word will make it break.

"You're my captain, and I'm with you," Akaashi whispers, "'til the end of the world. You’re going to find our crew and bring them home, Captain, and I’m going to stay by your side until you do. Do you understand?"

The force, the sincerity in his voice is so much more than what Bokuto thinks he knows of Akaashi. His face is not closed off like usual—no, it’s rippling with what looks like fear, with conviction, with a devotion that Bokuto has not seen often before. Akaashi stands there, wind whipping through his hair, and lets his cheeks turn scarlet and his forehead crumple in a way he would never let the others see.

He wouldn’t have needed to pour out his heart to Bokuto. Bokuto would still trust him and take him as far as he wanted to go.

So how can he refuse? What can he do, or say, but to squeeze Akaashi’s hands back?

"I know," he says. And that’s not enough, so, "I’m glad it’s you. I—Akaashi—"

His crew feel loyalty to him, and he feels love and gratitude towards them. He disentangles their hands and pulls Akaashi into a brief, fierce hug, just long enough to feel Akaashi’s heart thrumming beneath his chest and just short enough that Akaashi doesn’t start to squirm in his grasp.

"Don’t leave," is the thing he never wants to have to say.

And again and again, Akaashi has told him—not always out loud or in such words, but told him nonetheless. His response is something Bokuto still isn't always used to hearing; and yet, unlike so many other things, it makes more and more sense each time.

_("I never will.")_

After he lets Akaashi go, Bokuto takes a moment to press his hands under his eyes until the heat goes away. He can hear Akaashi taking long breaths nearby, steadying himself; and when he's done, he will be as strong and centred as a great tree in a tempest, and Bokuto allows himself to feel unrepressed hope again.

"So, captain," Akaashi says in time, voice level, "where should we start?"

Bokuto feels himself visibly start to freeze up and cringe away from a tongue-lashing that—thank goodness—Akaashi hasn't realised he might want to deliver. He hadn't actually thought about that.

"Well," he starts, deliberately flitting his gaze over the landscape as he fidgets with his hands. "We thought they'd be in the bush, but they're not, and that's got the most cover... and then we've looked along the cliff tussock..."

"Where they might have come if they were forced to fight." Akaashi nods, and his face stills to thinking.

He can still hear the waves pounding the cliffside. They're a long way down.

And something occurs to him.

"Akaashi?"

"Mm?"

"D'ya think these cliffs have, like, ledges or caves in 'em?"

Akaashi's eyes alight, and he scours the one bit of the cliff higher than where they are. "They might," he says. "I didn't want to get close to the edge in case it was unstable, but there might be something."

Bokuto only sort of half-listens to him after "they might", because he's already started towards the rise mere metres ahead, the one that sails out to the roiling sky until it stops and falls, down and down and down. He kind of hears something about "unstable", but the ground feels solid enough beneath his feet, and he drops to his knees just inches from the cliff edge.

And it's ridged and rugged, jagged and jutted, and he could probably manage it with his eyes closed, to say nothing of  _them_. Komi and Kaori both climb like monkeys—or goats, or chameleons, the way they can both scale trees and buildings and ropes as easily as crawling on still ground—and Washio's strong enough and sure enough in his movements that he could manage something like this. 

"Akaashi!"

Akaashi is decidedly slower and more cautious in his approach, but he crouches beside Bokuto with not an ounce of apprehension and nods.

"This might be it."

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Bokuto shoots a tentative, ecstatic grin at Akaashi, and every bit of tension and doubt he had in his body vanishes as Akaashi gives him a hand up and a slight, determined smile. "Let's find them!"

They ditch most of their stuff, save base layers of clothing and a weapon apiece, under the trees where it's sheltered, and start across the other side of the cliff, the one Akaashi deemed illogical for the others to have gone. Too close to the enemy ship. Too far from the bush to hide; too small to fight without someone taking a fall off the edge.

But logic rarely dictates desperate action, and Bokuto has no timepiece, but what feels like ten minutes into their search, Akaashi spots it.

"There! Look!"

A foot down the cliff face: a rope, attached half-hidden under a rocky ledge. Beneath it, blood in large smears, all the way down to a dark opening closer to the waves than anything else.

"Akaashi! It's them! It's gotta be!"

Bokuto hurries to the edge of the cliff—softer stone, less steady under his feet and knees—and squints at the sheer drop, trying to mark out the handholds he might use. Akaashi doesn't come with him, though; and when Bokuto turns, it is to see Akaashi drawing his sword.

"You're staying here?" Bokuto says, surprised. He doesn't miss, however, how Akaashi isn't really looking at him, but into the surrounding bush, and every few seconds, to the sea. His dark eyes are wary, as is his stance.

"It's safer if one of us stays lookout, and you climb better than I do, Bokuto-san."

"Ooh! That's good thinking!"

"Also, if this is actually an ambush they're planting from down there," Akaashi says lightly, pointing to the bloodied wall, and the thing that Bokuto hopes is a cave, " _one_ of us ought to be able to escape."

Bokuto's jaw drops.

" _Akaashi!_ "

Over his noises of disbelief—because  _sure_ , he doesn't  _think_ Akaashi would go off like that especially as they've just had a  _moment_ (dammit, why can't that guy learn to read a situation?), but he kinda has a point, _but_ Akaashi can't just  _leave him here alone,_ what the hell?—Akaashi hums once and turns back to watch the bush. "Bokuto-san, don't you have crewmates you should be rescuing right now?"

And just like that, the myriad of thoughts, the  _whys_ and  _wherefores_ and  _WHATS_ and whims, they all vanish. Flailing, trailing threads detangle and tighten, and Bokuto sees his path clearly down the rocky incline.

To Akaashi, he nods; to himself, he grins; and he swings himself over the edge without a second thought. The rope is rough and firm under his hands, and he's so familiar with the roughage and nooks of a cliff that it takes barely any time for him to half-abseil, half-freeclimb his way down to the cave.

And as he drops with a _thud_  in the entrance, someone with dyed hair in a black vest hurtles out of the tiny cave with a cry, slams into his chest—

_Komi._

—and clings on to him tight.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://museicaliteacup.tumblr.com/) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/museicalitea)
> 
> Kudos/comments are always appreciated!!


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